Exoplanets!

I think this whole announcement by NASA about scientists having discovered a solar system 40 light years away that has seven approximately Earth-sized planets orbiting close to each other, three of them in the inhabitable zone, is pretty damn awesome.

And it makes me want to write science fiction. Just think, what would it be like to live on a planet where the neighboring planets are as big on the sky as our Moon? What if one of the neighboring planets had life as well? What is it like when the "year" is only a handful of earth days long, and when the other planets are creating tidal forces like our Moon does on ours? What kind of life might develop on a planet which is tidally locked to its star?

It's sometimes rather amazing to be reminded that the universe is amazing and that we still know so little about it, but we can begin to learn these kind of things, at least.